Friday, February 19, 2010

A few weeks ago, i had met Dr.Balaji Sampath , to understand the 'Big Picture' in the Education NGO space in India. It helped me get a lot of clarity on the way forward for Deepam

According to him there are 3 models working well in India, presently

Asha / Aid ( US Chapter) - Fundraising organisations - they primarily raise money. their impact measured by the number of organisations they support - For example : 200 orgs supported in India in 2009 etc

Pudiyador / Sukrupa - Centre running orgs - They ensure Kids come to class. They hire teachers or invite volunteer orgs to teach. They are supported by fundraising orgs. Measure of impact - no of kids reached out, improvement in their standards

Content Orgs - Eureka books / Pratham books - These orgs primarily focus on curriculum . They research on the best content / curriculum and provide this for free / at a low cost to NGO's

The 4th type of Organisation - he says are slowly emerging - Deepam is one such. They go out and teach the kids in a focussed way. They can take content from 'content orgs' , go teach at 'centre running orgs' , which are funded byFundraising orgs

According to him, the value that Deepam has created is enormous - So far, the NGO space has been missing "consistency" and "focus" among the volunteer teachers. Someone going to a centre at the alloted time and teach the kids, a specific subject. He says this is quite rare and wanted us to build on what we have created so far.

He says when all 4 of the above is done by 1 organisation in the social sector, everything goes for a toss. Balaji has tried doing all of this in his initial days and failed. Finally, he decided to focus on content and content development.

Anyone here has a better way to segment the Education NGOs in India ? Would love to hear from you.

I think it is incorrect to say that ASHA is involved in fund raising alone. In many instances, there is an active participation of the volunteers in running the institution. Its strange that you did not bother to write about the most traditional and the best model - the Gurukula system, where no fees was collected, no hi-fi fund raising is required, no need to rely on any content provider and they create tremendous impact on the students learning there.Critics might say that such models rely a lot on the quality of the teachers but the same can be said for all other type of institutions.